An Afghan Symbol for Change, Then Failure

On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province’s most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.

This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.

“Our government is weak,” said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. “Anarchy has come.”

When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30 years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history here, building a modern capital with suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city “Little America.”

Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.

Helmand’s descent symbolizes how Afghanistan has evolved since the initial victory over the Taliban into one of the most troubled fronts in the fight against terrorism.

The problems began in early 2002, former Bush administration, United Nations and Afghan officials said, when the United States and its allies failed to take advantage of a sweeping desire among Afghans for help from foreign countries.

The Defense Department initially opposed a request by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and Afghanistan’s new leaders for a sizable peacekeeping force and deployed only 8,000 American troops, but purely in a combat role, officials said.

During the first 18 months after the invasion, the United States-led coalition deployed no peacekeepers outside Kabul, leaving the security of provinces like Helmand to local Afghans.

“Where the world, including the United States, came up short was on the security side,” said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department. “That was the mistake which I believe is coming back to haunt the United States now.”

The lack of security was just one element of a volatile mix. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures in Afghanistan, the world’s fifth poorest country, where the average life expectancy is 43.

American officials said the country was more destitute than they had envisioned, yet the $909 million they provided in assistance in 2002 amounted to one-twentieth of the $20 billion allocated for postwar Iraq. Officials quintupled assistance to $4.8 billion by 2005, but then reduced it by 30 percent this year.

The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, found safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. And Robert Grenier, the C.I.A.’s former top counterterrorism official and Islamabad station chief, said Pakistani officials largely turned a blind eye to Taliban commanders, who later seeped back across the border.

The government of President Hamid Karzai, hailed as Afghanistan’s eloquent new leader in 2001, has increasingly been criticized for indecisiveness, corruption and inaction.

In Helmand, the absence of security and government control enabled the province to become the largest heroin-producing area in Afghanistan.

By 2005, local Taliban fighters and drug traffickers had formed an alliance against the government. Today, the province’s educated elite accuses local officials of engaging in drug trafficking, and impoverished farmers say they grow poppy to survive.

[Led by a 160 percent increase in Helmand’s opium crop this year, Afghanistan’s overall production grew by 50 percent to a record 6,100 metric tons, United Nations officials said Saturday. Afghanistan now produces 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium poppy, the basis for heroin.]

Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, defended the pace of progress, saying expectations among Afghans and others that the war-ravaged country could be quickly rebuilt were unrealistic.

“Afghan development is a long-term project, even without the security problem,” said Mr. Boucher. “Over all, I think it’s pretty incredible what we’ve accomplished.”

Despite an active insurgency, he said, 1.6 million Afghan girls are attending school, 730 miles of roads and 1,000 schools, clinics and government buildings have been reconstructed, and the country has its first democratically elected president and Parliament.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the recent surge in violence was the result of the Afghan central government and NATO exerting their authority in remote areas, prompting retaliatory attacks from the Taliban, drug traffickers and warlords.

The return of more than three million Afghan refugees and the arrival of some foreign aid turned the country’s main cities into boom towns. But over time, the lack of construction in rural provinces fueled Taliban propaganda claims that Americans were enriching themselves and bringing only corruption to Afghanistan.

In impoverished southern rural areas, small numbers of Afghans are openly collaborating with the Taliban. Other Afghans, who say they are unsure of the American commitment and disillusioned with Mr. Karzai, sit by and dare not resist them.

Rauzia Baloch, a 33-year-old teacher, was one of a half dozen women elected to Helmand’s provincial council last year. In December, the American government sent her on a study tour of the United States that included visits to Congress and a domestic violence shelter in Phoenix, and Thanksgiving dinner with a family in Indiana.

When Ms. Baloch returned to Helmand, she found the Taliban assassinating government officials.

“I learned a lot, but unfortunately the situation is not the same as in America,” she said. “We cannot do anything.”

Countering the Soviets

During the cold war years in the Helmand Valley, amid a flat, barren landscape of reddish soil and black boulders, dozens of American engineers and their families carried out a sweeping project designed to develop impoverished southern Afghanistan and wean locals from Soviet influence.

For more than three decades, the American government and Morrison-Knudsen, the firm that built the Hoover Dam, restored and expanded an ancient irrigation system. Its source of life, then and now, was the surging Helmand River, a finger of green that emerges from the mountains of central Afghanistan and snakes for hundreds of miles through the country’s vast southern desert.

The project never irrigated as many acres as was hoped, but its training programs produced hundreds of American-minded Afghan engineers and technicians.

“Most of them have lived and worked and studied in the United States; some have married American wives,” the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote after visiting the area in 1960. “The new world that they are conjuring up out of the desert at the Helmand River’s expense is to be an America-in-Asia.”

Among the young Afghans who were transformed in the process was Ms. Olomi, the women’s rights advocate. One of the first girls to attend the city’s new co-educational school, she also went on to become one of Helmand’s first woman to graduate from college.

In a recent interview, Ms. Olomi, now 49, remembered only a handful of words in English. But she could still tick off the names of her American teachers and recite verses of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” After school, she recalled, she played a game called basketball with American children.

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Attendance at a sewing workshop for women in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, dropped after the driver for the programs founder was shot dead.Credit
Danfung Dennis for The New York Times

“It was a very good time,” she said, eulogizing the functioning schools, clean streets and tranquillity of Lashkar Gah in the 1960’s and 1970’s. “I was very happy.”

But her good fortune, like that of Lashkar Gah’s, would be short-lived. Americans abandoned the city just before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty years of guerrilla and civil war ensued.

By the early 1990’s, soldiers-turned-thieves roamed Lashkar Gah’s streets and warlords encouraged local farmers to grow opium poppies, the raw form of heroin.

In 1994, residents welcomed the rise of the Taliban in Helmand’s remote villages and applauded when thieves had their hands chopped off on a local soccer field. Crime plummeted.

For Ms. Olomi and other women, life fell apart. Her husband, who had gone to Russia to study medicine, never returned. Taliban religious police closed a girls’ school she had opened to support herself. Ms. Olomi, who had chosen her husband at the age of 25, watched helplessly as her daughter was forced by her husband’s brothers to marry a cousin at 13.

Hopes rose again in 2001, when American bombs drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Residents like Ms. Olomi said they dreamed of another American-backed renaissance.

“At that time, we really felt so happy,” she said. “We felt that we were free now.”

Roads and Roadblocks

As expectations soared in Lashkar Gah and across Afghanistan, division emerged in Washington over what role the United States should play in rebuilding and securing the country.

During meetings in January and February 2002, Robert Finn, the first American ambassador to post-Taliban Afghanistan, proposed that the United States undertake ambitious construction projects as a way to cement the loyalty of Afghans. Top among them was rebuilding a pulverized ring road linking Afghanistan’s major cities — a road Americans helped build during the cold war.

“I argued for them to build the road and all I got was ‘no,’ ” Mr. Finn recalled. “It was just across the board in Washington: ‘We don’t do those kinds of projects anymore.’ ”

Andrew Natsios, then the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, the government’s main foreign development arm that had spearheaded the Lashkar Gah project years back, confirmed in an interview that he had opposed road building and other large construction projects.

He said he feared they would consume too much of his agency’s limited budget and staff. Criticism of failed foreign projects and a drive to privatize aid work had shrunk the agency from 3,000 Americans posted abroad in the 1980’s to 1,000 today.

In the end, the United States pledged $297 million in reconstruction money to Afghanistan in 2002. The European Union pledged $495 million. Japan gave $200 million and Saudi Arabia $73 million, but both were slow to deliver.

When aid officials arrived in Kabul in late 2001, they were shocked by the country’s decrepit state. They had to build headquarters from scratch, they said, and contend with the lack of skilled Afghan workers. For remote areas like Helmand, it meant what assistance was available flowed in slowly.

At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell clashed over security issues, according to their aides.

In a response to written questions, Mr. Powell said that in early 2002 he called for American troops to participate in the expansion of a 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force designed to bolster Mr. Karzai’s fledgling government. Mr. Haass, the former State Department official, said informal conversations with European officials led him to believe the United States could recruit a force of 30,000 peacekeepers, half European, half American.

Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides were skeptical. They feared European countries would not provide enough troops, according to Mr. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman. Defense Department officials believed it was better to train local security forces.

Over all, Pentagon officials hoped to minimize the number of American troops in the country to avoid stoking Afghans’ historic resistance to foreign occupation, said Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary for policy.

Ali Ahmed Jalali, the country’s interior minister from 2002 to 2005, said Afghan resentment of foreign peacekeepers was “a myth.” After 10 years of internecine civil war, he said, Afghans yearned for someone to step in.

“They could not help themselves,” he said, referring to Afghans. “They were at war with themselves.”

James Dobbins, then the administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said Mr. Powell was ultimately unable to win support from Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials.

The 4,000-soldier international peacekeeping force would not venture outside Kabul. The United States deployed its 8,000 soldiers separately, but they focused on capturing or killing Taliban and Qaeda members, not on peacekeeping or reconstruction.

As an alternative, officials came up with a loosely organized system designed to empower Afghans to secure the country. The United States would train a 70,000-soldier army. Japan would demobilize some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out judicial reform. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.

In April 2002, President Bush outlined his vision for rebuilding Afghanistan in a speech honoring George C. Marshall, the American general who led the rebuilding of postwar Europe.

Mr. Bush said the history of military conflict in Afghanistan had been marked by “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.” He vowed: “We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”

On the ground in Afghanistan, problems arose immediately.

When Mr. Finn, the ambassador, reviewed the first Afghan National Army troops trained by the Americans in the summer of 2002, he was dismayed.

“They were illiterate,” he said. “They didn’t know how to keep themselves clean. They were at a much lower level than people expected.”

American military officials told him that local Afghan commanders sent them their worst conscripts.

Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy to Afghanistan, said Defense Department hopes that Afghans could quickly take responsibility for their own security proved unrealistic.

“The reason we are there is that these are failed states,” said Mr. Dobbins, who has also served as special envoy to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. “The thought that this can be quickly remedied has proved unjustified in most cases.”

The police were even more challenging. Seventy percent of the existing 80,000 officers were illiterate. Eighty percent lacked proper equipment and corruption was endemic. Afghan police did not patrol; they set up checkpoints and waited for residents to report crimes, with bribes often needed to do so.

Yet in 2002 and 2003, Germany, the country responsible for police training, dispatched only 40 advisers. They reopened the Kabul police academy and began a program designed to graduate 3,500 senior officers in three years. German officials said developing a core of skilled commanders was the key to reform, frustrating American officials who backed a large, countrywide training effort. Some American and European military units conducted ad hoc training around the country, but no comprehensive instruction occurred outside Kabul.

Shattered Judicial System

In Lashkar Gah, veteran policemen and judges who returned from living in exile during the reign of the Taliban were aghast at what they found. Only one-third of the province’s 3,000 policemen were, in fact, trained. The rest, including the provincial police chief, were former guerrilla fighters who punished members of other tribes and turned a blind eye toward rogues from their own.

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Government officials, tribal elders and community leaders met for a public forum in Helmand in July. Is this a government? one asked. Anyone other than me would join the Taliban.Credit
Danfung Dennis for The New York Times

“They did not know about the law,” said Abdul Shakoor, a veteran police lieutenant. “They had their tribal ideas.”

Abdul Waheed Afghani, then a 67-year-old retired judge who had been in exile in Saudi Arabia, said the judicial system was no better. When he looked for judges to send to each of the province’s 13 districts, he found only three people with judicial training. He asked for help from Kabul, but received no response.

“I have given reports to many branches of the government,” he said. “But no one has helped me.”

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The only foreign troops to deploy in Helmand, a province twice the size of Maryland with a population of one million, were several dozen American Special Forces soldiers. They built a base in the center of the province in 2002, hired several hundred Afghan gunmen to protect them, and focused solely on hunting Taliban and Qaeda remnants, according to Afghan officials.

Helmand Province’s voluble young governor, Sher Muhammad Akhund, was largely left to do as he pleased. The son of a famed local commander who fought the Soviets, Mr. Akhund entered Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001 at Mr. Karzai’s request and won control of Helmand with the help of the Special Forces. Rumors abounded about the governor. In interviews with journalists, Mr. Akhund said he was in his early 30’s and a high school graduate. Afghan aid workers said he was in his late 20’s and illiterate.

Whatever he may have lacked in administrative skills, he made up for in muscle. As the head of Helmand’s largest and most influential tribe, the Alizai, he commanded several hundred gunmen.

As time passed, community leaders grew frustrated with Mr. Akhund. Haji Ahmad Shah, a wealthy local farmer, said Mr. Akhund initially refused to meet with him to discuss farmers’ problems. When he finally did, he ignored the complaints.

“When I was sharing these problems with the governor, he didn’t do anything,” said Mr. Shah. “He was just working for his own benefit.”

In 2003, Mr. Akhund confiscated 200 shops owned by a local minority group, according to a State Department report. Outside the city, the governor doled out parcels of land to his relatives and tribe, according to residents. Mr. Akhund denied the accusations.

At the same time, reports began to reach Kabul that Mr. Akhund was promoting the growth of poppy, according to an American official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the drug issue.

After the fall of the Taliban, poppy growth had exploded in eastern and southern Afghanistan, fed by poverty, weak law enforcement and an epic, five-year drought.

Mr. Akhund vehemently denied rumors that he took a cut of the poppy trade, but foreign officials remained skeptical. [On Saturday, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, blamed Mr. Akhund specifically for Helmand’s soaring poppy crop, saying there was evidence he encouraged farmers to grow opium poppies.]

While corruption grew in Afghanistan, the Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and changed tactics, according to American officials. After being decimated in open battles with American troops through 2002, the Taliban began ambushing small groups of American soldiers and unarmed aid workers in 2003. Over time, aid groups scaled back or suspended reconstruction projects in the rural south and east.

In March, a group of gunmen in Oruzgan Province pulled a foreign engineer out of a vehicle belonging to the International Red Cross, shot him in the head and back, and left his body in the dirt.

Two days later, in a remote riverbed in northern Helmand, gunmen ambushed American Special Forces as they drove past in a small convoy, killing two soldiers. When their comrades stopped to return fire, the gunmen vanished down a maze of gullies.

U.S. Shifts Course

In the summer of 2003, officials in Washington unveiled an overhaul of American policy in Afghanistan.

Until then, Americans had rebuilt the main highway linking Kabul and Kandahar, after initially rejecting the road proposal by Mr. Finn, the ambassador. Otherwise, Washington had shied away from large-scale projects like power plants.

Between 2003 and 2004, American assistance to Afghanistan increased from $962 million to $2.4 billion; the Afghanistan staff of the United States aid agency doubled; and Washington dispatched an aggressive new ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

At the same time, the American military, expanding its role beyond combat, deployed eight new Provincial Reconstruction Teams, mostly to volatile southern and eastern Afghanistan. The units tried to win the loyalty of Afghans by equipping local government offices and mounting small reconstruction projects.

Mr. Feith, the former Defense Department official, said progress was made in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, but that the disappointing results of the allies’ plan for training the police required an increased American effort.

Former United Nations and State Department officials said the weakness in the Afghanistan policy should have been apparent to the administration much earlier. “It was possible in early 2002 and late 2001 to have calculated more accurately the manpower and money needs,” said Mr. Dobbins.

In Helmand, a field commander in the new development effort was Charles Grader. The 72-year-old Massachusetts native was the last American to head the Afghanistan program before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Twenty-five years later, he was back, managing a $130 million United States government contract to revitalize agriculture and slow the growth of poppy.

Mr. Grader was a marker of how the American approach to development had changed since the 1970’s. No longer a government worker, he was now a private contractor paid $130,000 a year by Chemonics International, a for-profit consulting firm based in Washington. Instead of directing projects, the United States aid agency hired companies like Chemonics, which farmed out work to subcontractors.

In June 2004, Mr. Grader drove into Lashkar Gah with eight security guards and found a burgeoning city of 100,000 people that was a maze of new construction, shops and bustling open-air markets. But the prosperity was illusory. The boom was largely fueled by Helmand’s opium trade, which by then had been spreading across the province for two and a half years since the Taliban was defeated.

On his first stop, Mr. Grader toured a demonstration farm bursting with cotton, pomegranates and other crops designed to show farmers they could make a legal living. Mr. Grader asked the Afghans who ran the farm what would persuade others to stop growing poppy.

Their responses had little to do with agriculture. They said the biggest problem was poverty and corruption. Farmers, they said, no longer believed the government would punish them for growing poppy.

“There is an inverse relationship between security and poppy growing,” said Abdul Ghani Ayubi, an engineer trained by the Americans in the 1970’s.

A local farmer was more blunt. “We don’t have law. This is a warlord kingdom.”

Mr. Grader promised to create public works projects that would repair the province’s irrigation system and employ large numbers of farmers. Four months later he resigned after clashing with aid agency officials over the direction of the program. High turnover rates among both aid agency officials and contractors slowed the American effort, according to Afghan and American officials.

Some work did get under way, including repairs to the hydroelectric dam built by Americans during the cold war and an alternative-livelihoods program that put 37,000 Afghans to work cleaning hundreds of irrigation canals.

A dozen new or refurbished health clinics were opened and over 100 wells were dug or deepened. The aid agency reported spending about $180 million in Helmand since 2001. In addition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan’s major highway included 90 miles in the province.

But local officials said these projects did not provide enough jobs to counter the lure of growing opium poppies for Helmand’s 100,000 farmers.

In addition, a popular perception took hold that after foreign contractors and subcontractors took their cut of aid money, little cash was left for average Afghans. And local residents grew suspicious of the foreigners who lived in heavily guarded compounds with electric generators and satellite televisions while they lacked regular running water and electricity.

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An off-duty Afghan policeman rested on an outdoor bunk bed recently. American and local officials say training has been difficult because of high rates of illiteracy and corruption.Credit
Danfung Dennis for The New York Times

Aid agency officials defended their spending in Helmand, saying that foreign workers were needed to properly carry out the projects, train Afghans and prevent corruption.

In October 2004, one of the eight new American military Provincial Reconstruction Teams arrived in Helmand. Over the next two years, the team spent $9.5 million to build, refurbish or equip 28 schools, two police stations, two orphanages, a prison, a hospital ward and 20 miles of roads.

Just outside the American base, the United States built a women’s job-training center for Ms. Olomi to run. The Americans provided dozens of computers and sewing machines and even set up a mock beauty salon so women could learn marketable skills. On one wall are pictures of Laura Bush visiting Afghanistan and meeting with the country’s newly liberated women.

Brazen Attacks Increase

By the spring of 2005, the stepped-up American effort in Helmand was showing signs of being overmatched by the rising violence. On a May morning, gunmen stopped a vehicle carrying five Afghans working on the program to clean irrigation canals. In broad daylight a few miles outside Lashkar Gah, they shot the workers dead.

The following day, gunmen followed six relatives of one of the victims as they drove his body back to Kabul. Just off the main highway, they executed all six.

Days later, the canal cleaning project — perhaps the Americans’ most successful undertaking in Helmand — was shut down over lack of security. Thousands of farmers were immediately out of work. Attacks also slowed repairs to the Kajaki dam.

Security had emerged as the largest single impediment to developing Helmand, but the country’s nascent army and police force were unable to deliver it. The first units from the new, American-trained Afghan National Army arrived in Helmand in 2005, but they comprised only several hundred soldiers and carried out few operations, according to local Afghan officials. A new provincial antinarcotics force was created that year, but it consisted of just 30 officers.

The long-delayed Japanese-led program to disarm militia fighters began in Helmand in 2005, but only several hundred assault rifles and machine guns were collected, according to the local police. Officials said vast numbers of weapons remain in Helmand and are being used by the Taliban and drug traffickers.

Police training also continued to lag behind. After Germany failed to mount any training outside Kabul, the State Department hired DynCorp International, an Irving, Tex., firm, to recruit, train and deploy dozens of American police advisers in Afghanistan and build seven regional training centers.

By mid-2004, the centers were operating two- to four-week training classes across Afghanistan. European officials said the training should be at least three months long, and one derided the classes as “conveyor-belt courses.”

“I had 15 days’ training in Kandahar,” said Mr. Shakoor, the police lieutenant. “The things that they were teaching me I already knew.”

Corruption was also undermining progress. A 28-year-old police recruit who asked not to be identified because he feared retaliation said he was disappointed when he returned from training to his district in Helmand. His commander continued to take 50 percent of his salary, he said, and work with drug traffickers.

The United States, meanwhile, expanded DynCorp’s police training contract, increasing basic courses from two to eight weeks, and sent two DynCorp contractors to important provinces to serve as advisers. Two retired American sheriff’s deputies were sent to Lashkar Gah, to cover all of Helmand.

Jesse Valdez, 55, from Santa Cruz, Calif., had trained police officers in Bosnia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Steve Rubcic, 58, from Wyoming, had never been east of Wisconsin.

When they arrived in October, security was so bad they could not visit any of the province’s 13 districts. In interviews, both said the Afghan police were eager for help and that they were making progress removing corrupt officials. Six weeks after they arrived, a small car bomb detonated outside the governor’s office several minutes before they arrived for a meeting.

In March, two more DynCorp advisers joined them in Lashkar Gah. A month later, a suicide car bomb attack flipped their armored vehicle, but they survived. Both refused to leave.

In June, American officials dispatched an eight-man DynCorp “saturation” training team to Lashkar Gah. Brent Thompson, a 33-year-old former police officer from Dallas who heads the team, said American officials calculated that six Afghan policemen were dying for every soldier in the National Army who was killed.

Half of the saturation team’s two-week training course is devoted to teaching Afghan police military skills, like how to launch or survive an ambush. Mr. Thompson, who trained the police in Iraq for DynCorp, said the Afghan police were more poorly equipped than their Iraqi counterparts. In one recent Afghan class, he said, 40 police officers shared 15 rifles.

As of early July, the training segment that involved police firing their rifles was on hold. Security problems had delayed the delivery of ammunition to Lashkar Gah, according to Mr. Thompson.

During the training, Afghan officers pull the triggers on their rifles and pretend to fire.

Scorn From Locals

On July 10, Helmand’s senior government officials, tribal elders and community leaders gathered for a public forum in Lashkar Gah entitled “Security, Reconstruction and Official Corruption.” For the next hour, the locals heaped scorn on the Afghan government. Speaker after speaker talked of dashed hopes.

The leader of the newly elected provincial assembly said that “in a country where there is no security, there is nothing.” A teacher who had received death threats from the Taliban warned that Mr. Karzai’s government could collapse. An enraged tribal leader in a white turban said the police released the murderers of his sons and brothers after receiving bribes.

“Is this a government?” he thundered. “Anyone other than me would join the Taliban.”

This spring, American forces handed over responsibility for Helmand to the British military. More than 3,600 British troops, 10 times the troops the United States deployed in Helmand, now patrol the increasingly violent province. This year, 15 British and 4 American soldiers have been killed there.

The violence has continued to hamper reconstruction. The canal cleaning project has resumed, but on a much smaller scale — and with many fewer local workers — than originally planned. Some road work is proceeding. But all repairs on the hydroelectric dam were suspended in July amid rising attacks. Nationwide, 90 percent of Afghans still lack regular electricity.

Since early 2005, both Afghan and foreign officials had urged Mr. Karzai to remove Mr. Akhund as Helmand’s governor. Last December, Mr. Karzai finally did. The Afghan leader’s supporters argue that he was never provided with the resources needed to take on warlords.

The new governor, an engineer and former United Nations employee, accepted the assignment on condition he have his own 150-man security force. This spring, Mr. Karzai fired the province’s police chief, but his replacement said he will make little headway stabilizing the province as long as the Taliban continues to have bases in neighboring Pakistan.

Mr. Afghani, the province’s chief judge, said Taliban attacks this spring have shut down courts in 11 of the province’s 13 districts. In June, he found an unexploded bomb in his car. In July, a suicide bomber killed four people in a Lashkar Gah court office.

“Nowadays, no one is taking care of judges in our government,” he said. “We are helpless people. We don’t have any power. We don’t have any police.”

Mr. Shah, the farmer, said he has given up on Mr. Karzai’s government. After growing little opium since 2001, he grew large amounts this spring after his workers demanded higher pay. He and other farmers simply pooled their money and bribed a local official so that eradication teams drove past their village.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Olomi gave a reporter a tour of her women’s center, which was closed for security reasons after the killing of her driver in May. False rumors had been spread that the center’s female students were being taken to the local American military base and forced to have sex with soldiers.

After the tour of the center, which had the feel of a museum, Ms. Olomi announced she was heading home and pulled out a burqa, the head-to-toe veil that became a symbol of Taliban oppression. Ms. Olomi shed her burqa after the group’s fall in 2001, but began wearing it again after her driver’s death to hide her identity from potential assassins.

As her car rolled out the center’s front gate, Ms. Olomi pulled the burqa over her head and her face disappeared. In Little America in 2006, the former instrument of her oppression was her means of survival.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul for this article.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe